It’s been an interesting day with some conversations that I’d like to throw out to all of you. It’s not secret to this group that technology is changing our industry on a daily basis. New things get introduced, speech recognition plays an even bigger role than before, and sometimes it can be daunting to keep up.

At the same time, medical transcriptionists have also been really good at knowing and understanding the “rules” related to things like grammar and punctuation. It has been our responsibility to “fix” those things if they aren’t dictated and to be sure that we make the appropriate edits in the reports we transcribe.

Today the conversation centered around speech recognition, and particularly as it relates to using the Book of Style and making those kind of corrections to what the engine produces. One MT tells me that she is hearing editors are not allowed to make any changes to reports except where the engine had a word recognition error. Think about that for a minute.

When editing is done with a speech recognition engine, it “trains” the engine to recognize things correctly the next time. So does adding things like punctuation and changing grammar train the engine improperly? What about those reports where you have a left/right discrepancy, and you have enough information to know which one is correct? If you edit that “left” to now say “right,” have you just told the engine that when it hears “left,” it now needs to put in “right”? It’s not something I’ve ever really thought about until today.

I have said for a long time that the move to the electronic record will re-define the word “quality.” I can’t say that I’m sure what that means yet as I don’t think we’ve seen enough to know.

So, if the things above are the reality of our world, how do we prepare a new generation of medical transcriptionists? Does our focus change from things like the Book of Style? Teaching the rules in the Book of Style is now a critically important part of what we ask educational facilities to do, at least if they are seeking AHDI approval for their program. Will the future change that? Will we become more focused on content and context and less on the rules of grammar and punctuation? And yes, I know we do that now, I just mean will we shift even more?

I’d love to hear what YOUR experience is with using this technology! What changes are you seeing in how you do your work?